Electric i

stubbleupdate:

"How do you know when somebody has an iPhone?

They tell you."

It's going to be difficult to get through this entry without invoking this, then, isn't it? This weekend, I finally jumped forwards about five years and joined the world of smart phones - Whitney had got one during my absence in California, and it was something that we had thought about doing for some time due to it not being all that much more expensive than our existing service (and having better coverage in our house). I was actually torn for ages between it and an Android phone in the spirit of openness, but was pleased that some Clickteam people thought I had made the right decision in that it's far better to develop for.

Whitney has been doing her best to show me how to work it, and this must be how my dad feels when people try to explain how to use his Bluetooth adapter. The afternoon I got it, I think I lost an argument with it - I mistakenly found the voice control menu, tried asking it to go to "Internet" and "Email" and was told both times that "No music is present". Then I tried "Pause music", and it impatiently said "No music is playing" and kicked me out back to the main menu.

I've been exploring around it this morning, have worked out how to get music playing on it and everything and have compressed the menu down to one page of icons that I'm actually likely to use, and have had the wonderful experience of finally getting to use my own transit tracker during my morning commute. It alone suddenly makes things far more pleasant and non-anxious, as does having the opportunity to see exactly where you are through the map - with it turned on in a taxi that didn't know where he was going last weekend, it was quite unsettling watching the blue spot representing us smoothly following the streets.

Though it was meant to replace our phones, it's already come in extraordinarily useful as an Internet device, because last night the Comcast Internet service for the entire east coast of America broke down, followed shortly by the Comcast phone system breaking down because of everybody on the east coast of America phoning them about the Internet breaking down. And yet we could still keep going through the 3G network, like having a torch in a powercut.